BDSMH: San Francisco Passes Measure to Save Kink District

San Francisco’s historic queer leather scene is presently endangered by the city’s rampant rise of gentrification and income inequality. But it has found an unusual daddy: the local government.

On Monday, dozens of kinksters and members of the area’s BDSM community rallied at San Francisco’s City Hall to attend the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting, where a measure to designate the South of Market neighborhood (SoMa) as an LGBTQ+ and Leather Cultural District was unanimously approved.

The distinction aims to protect the SoMa area’s long history as a hotbed for queer people and kinksters by preserving local leather shops and providing more affordable housing to its residents, a pervasive issue in San Francisco that has pushed many longtime occupants, especially people of color, from their historic neighborhoods.

SoMA is famous for hosting the annual Folsom Street Fair, the world’s largest leather and fetish event that drew over 250,000 people to the city in 2017. It also hosts the Up Your Alley Fair, which brands itself as “not for the faint of heart,” if that helps you picture it. But at the moment, only four queer bars in the thirty blocks that comprise SoMa remain — The Stud, The Eagle, The Powerhouse and The Lone Star.

“The purpose of a cultural district is to protect a living, breathing community. We need to do more than just paint rainbow crosswalks and slap up some plaques saying ‘Hey, we were here,’” Nate Allbee, a co-owner of The Stud and co-author of the legislation, told SF Weekly.

At its peak, SoMa was home to some 16 leather bars, 10 bathhouses and sex clubs and eight leather retail establishments, according to SFist. The Toolbox, the first leather bar on the scene established in 1962, is now a Whole Foods. Presciently, the Folsom Street Fair began as a 1984 community protest against redevelopment amid an “urban renewal” push from City Hall in the wake of widespread panic over the AIDS epidemic. Originally known as “Megahood,” it was meant to portray the area as an already thriving community.

It’s ironic, then, that today the queer leather scene has had to turn to its former adversary, San Francisco’s city government, for protection — and it’s indicative of the assimilatory tactics many LGBTQ+ spaces and people have felt compelled to adopt in order to survive. Even Folsom Street Fair, which celebrates kinky sex, has since lost some of its rough edges as corporate sponsors like American Airlines and Marquis Hotels have come into play.

“In the old days, what made the fair so dirty was that all the vendors were part of the act; they were the act,” Tim Valenti, CEO of San Francisco’s Naked Sword, a gay porn website, told SFGate in a 2013 interview. He said that while displays of bondage and public sex still occurred at the fair, it had become more mainstream, and organizers came down “with an iron fist” on sexual activity in booths of the vendors.

While the San Francisco kink community celebrates the move to protect queer culture in SoMa,more and more gay bars are shuttering as LGBTQ+ districts give way to gentrification. One example is Chicago’s Boystown, a historical gay district where Man’s Country, a gay Uptown bathhouse, closed early this year after 44 years of business, and Spin Nightclub closed back in 2014. It’s a cultural shift that can be felt in cities across America, like in Indianapolis and Louisville. Designation as a historical site is one avenue for salvation, as New York’s famous Stonewall Inn, now a city landmark, proves.

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But this option isn’t available for every bar, and while the actions of the San Francisco city government are deserving of applause, they serve as an uncomfortable reminder to queer communities who are being priced out of their historic homes: it might be up to the government, a longtime agent of queer oppression, to save them.

John Paul Brammer is a New York-based writer and advice columnist from Oklahoma whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, NBC, BuzzFeed and more. He is currently in the process of writing his first novel.

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